Samsung’s Galaxy series has come a long way over the past two years. Back in 2010 Samsung introduced the original Galaxy S, which also became the basis for the Nexus S. Last year the company rolled out the very successful S II, with a bigger 4.3-inch screen and a dual-core Exynos chip. It was Samsung’s best phone to date and it won the hearts of millions, making it probably the most popular Android phone of all time.

So, expectations for the third iteration of this phone were very high and speculation was rampant, resulting in some outlandish and amusing rumours. In the end we ended up with a 4.8-inch phone with a Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen under a layer of Gorilla Glass 2. The resolution is 1280x720 pixels, which translates into 306 pixels per inch. Pentile Super AMOLED is something that we’ve already seen on the Galaxy Nexus and to be honest it’s not as good as Super LCD used in the HTC One X. In some respects Super AMOLED comes out on top, but this is a matter of personal preference and let’s leave it at that.

The phone measures 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm and weighs 133 grams and despite the larger screen it does not feel much bigger than its predecessor, in part thanks to the curved design. It comes with 16GB memory, but 32GB and 64GB versions should be available at some point. With the 16GB users end up with about 12GB at their disposal and many will like the fact that this phone has a microSD slot. Samsung also offers 50GB of Dropbox storage, something that consumers will appreciate. Basically when it comes to storage options, the S III is hands down the winner in the 720p superphone market.

The phone is equipped with an 8-megapixel camera capable of delivering 3264x2448 shots. It is an autofocus camera, with LED flash and it’s capable of 1080p video at 30FPS. The camera will let you take HD videos and pictures at the same time, which is nice. HDR functionality is on board, too, The front camera has a 1.9-megapixel sensor capable of 720p at 30FPS which is quite good for a front facing camera. Image quality is surprisingly good and will be great for Facebook self-portraits or video chat.

At present time the S III ships with Android 4.0.4 that works just fine and on top of it, you’ve guessed it, TouchWiz UI that is designed to match the phone’s color, in our case Pebble Blue. The other option is to get this phone in white and other colour options are reportedly on the way.

A removable battery is also something that many missed with the HTC One X and it packs quite a punch, as it is capable of storing 2100mAh of juice. The processor behind this beast is Samsung’s 32nm Exynos 4412 quad-core at 1.4GHz that can drop to 200MHz. It turns out that the processor is very efficient and coupled with a large power pack, battery life is impressive. The graphics core integrated in this SoC is ARM’s Mali 400MP4 and you will see how well it did in our benches.

The usual array of sensors, including an accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensor, compass, barometer are also part of the phone and the phone comes with some quite useful motion sensor tricks. Active noise cancelation is also present with the help of a dedicated microphone, but to be honest we didn’t find it give the S III much of an edge over other high-end phones we used. TV-out is possible but only via MHL A/V link. The box contains the phone, earbud headset and a charger, no unnecessary gimmicks here.

First Impression

In terms of design, the phone is dominated by the spacious 4.8-inch screen, speaker, tiny light and proximity sensors, a 1.9-megapixel front camera as well as quite large home button.

Samsung placed the back and settings buttons next to the home button, which is pretty much the company’s standard layout. The back side features a speaker, camera with LED flash and of course, a Samsung logo. The bottom of the phone hides a bog standard micro USB port, while the 3.5mm audio jack is located at the top.

The traditional Samsung layout continues on the sides. The power/lock button is on the right hand side and the volume rocker on the left. There is no dedicated camera button.

At its launch event Samsung told the world that the Galaxy S3 was inspired by pebbles, water and natural design and it tells the story with interactive live wallpapers that with water ripple effects accompanied by sound. Some will like it, others will not. The shape of the phone really reminds us of the Galaxy Nexus with a somewhat flimsier cover.

The back cover mechanism is very similar to the one used on the Galaxy Nexus and we cannot resist saying that the back of the back cover feels really cheap, especially for such a pricey device.

Greasy smudges will appear as soon as you lay your hands on it, especially in the freakish hot weather experienced around the world this summer. The plastic itself feels cheap and it is actually significantly worse than the Galaxy 2, which is really surprising.

The Pebble Blue color looks nice on this phone and if you love jeans, it’s probably a better choice than the white one, but once again this is a matter of personal preference. In any case the design is great, the phone looks a lot sleeker than its predecessor and the only letdown is the flimsy battery cover.

User interface, software

At first startup the Galaxy S III kindly asks you to set up a Samsung account that can actually backup Logs, SMS, MMS and settings which can come handy. Once you finish that you are asked to set up the usual Google Play routine like with any other Android phone. Each confirmation is followed by a quite annoying digital water drop sound, but we are sure that once you finish, you can turn it off. Like we said, some will like this sound and ripple effect. [You obviously didn't. Ed]

After the Google Play setup dance, the wizard asks you to claim you 50GB Dropbox account that will be yours for two years, or until the Galaxy S5 comes out. Just like HTC with its One series, Samsung also included a guide for its TouchWiz interface that will tell you how to use your phone, e.g. swipe your finger across the screen to unlock your phone, swipe to the left of right to switch between home screens. This guide is probably meant for first time Android users as these features are common across the Android world.

After setting up the phone, we were asked to do a 21MB update that installed fairly quickly and optimized the whopping 63 preinstalled applications that come with this phone. The update brings Android 4.0.4 to the phone and when we were finishing this article we got a notification that 63MB update was available that took a bit more to install, but we could not notice any major changes. The update was apparently supposed to bring stability, but so far we didn’t get experience and stability issues out of the ordinary even without the update. There is still no exact date for the Jelly Bean 4.1 update for this phone, but we probably won’t have to wait long for it.

What makes this phone stand out from the rest of the crowd are a few innovative sensor applications that we haven’t seen on previous smartphones. The Galaxy S III can turn off the screen when you are not looking at it (in case it recognize your face), smart alert will notify you about missed calls or notification once you pick up your phone, double tap will get you on top of the list, you can tilt your phone to zoom, pan to move icon or browse images. You can also shake the phone to update, turn over to mute or pause. We also liked the fact that you can swipe in front of the front camera from right to left to take a screenshot and palm touch to move or pause the phone. Samsung came up with a few very clever tricks to make your life easier, so kudos to the engineers.

And now for a small digression. It took us a while to figure out why the browser looked rather dark compared to to HTC One X, Optimus 4X or even the old Galaxy S II. The answer is simple, the browser has its own brightness settings independent from the rest of the phone. This is a nice trick that will save you some battery and trick you into using auto brigtness while browsing.

The phone is really quick and the snappy Exynos quad-core definitely makes it one the fastest on the market. It boots fast, it reboots just as fast and it’s generally very fast in normal everyday tasks like browsing the internet. Phone calls will work as expected, Skype or Viber will work well too, but will get the phone hotter due the extensive CPU use.

The CPU clock varies from 200MHz all the way to 1400MHz when necessary and with the 2100mAh battery this got us to two to three days of battery life. Three day battery life is without mail and Facebook synching, which is probably not a realistic scenario for most users, but two days should be possible for many casual users. Hard core users have to know that display with high brightness will kill the battery in 8 to 10 hours deepening on the task you are performing, naturally if it’s always on.

Games like Shadowgun will get the phone battery to 40 or more Celsius 104 Fahrenheit which is roughly as much as Tegra 3 phones in similar circumstances. Extensive gaming and demanding games with a lot of eye candy might get your phone even hotter, but since the CPU is at the lower part of the phone, you will be able to feel it. The CPU on the HTC One X and LG Optimus 4X is located beneath the camera. The general conclusion is that all quad-core phones with high-end games get very hot, no exceptions.

The app drawer is pretty close to plain ICS, apart from a few additional options and the placement of the status bar. On a separate note, I would really like to meet the developer who thought that it would be a good idea to name an app designed specifically for the Austrian market “MeinKauf.”

Samsung ships the phone with a lot of bloatware, including Chat on, All share play, game hub, HRS hotels, S Memos, S Planner, S Suggest and Samsung Apps, but most notable one that we spent some time with is S Voice, Samsung’s attempt to take on Siri.

Samsung sees itself as an equal of Apple, and ever since Apple came with Siri, Samsung wanted to create its own competitor. The application eventually came to market as S Voice and it offered Siri-like functionality. S Voice would have made sense had Google not incorporated a vastly superior voice search engine in Android 4.1, which is not only better than S Voice, but Siri as well. To be fair, S Voice will answer some basic questions and more importantly it understands a few different languages. It was able to tell me the weather in German, Italian, as well as English. This is not bad as I am not native to any of these languages. Waking up S Voice in Italian stats with Ciao Galaxy, German is Hallo Galaxy and English Hello Galaxy. S Voice is a nice toy that you might even end up using at some point, but like Siri, only the most persistent will use it all the time.

There are a few downsides. S Voice was rather slow in coming up with answers. In addition, after a long search on the Samsung servers you will get "I didn’t catch that please try again” way too often. When we politely inquired about the wingspan of an African swallow, like Nermin in his Android 4.1 review here, this is what we got.

Some simple things like setting a task to hire John or meeting with Peter at 6 PM would work, but sometimes it would take way too long to process. If you have friends with non-English names good luck convincing your phone that they are persons. For example, S-Voice things that my nickname, Fudo, is food food (yes 2X food).

S-Voice is a nice toy, but the Jelly Bean update will render this tool completely obsolete. We like the fact that it understands a few major languages, but so does Google Now. S-Voice won’t work in airplane mode, despite the fact that we turn the wifi on, the phone has to be in a normal mode in order for this tool to work.

Performance, Camera

Before we get to the performance part of the review, we would like to say a thing or two about the two cameras. The main 8-megapixel camera makes quite good pictures, and takes up to 20 pictures in burst mode. It can capture 1080p video at 30FPS and take pictures simultaneously, just like the One X or Xperia S.

The front camera, with its 720p capability and 1.9-megapixel sensor, was surprisingly good. It’s good enough for self-portraits.

It’s tough to decide who has the best camera on the market at this moment, the One X and S III are very closely matched and you won’t go wrong with either. The Galaxy will deliver nice photos and videos and it should be enough for any phone camera power user. We also liked the camera UI, as it's pretty intuitive and streamlined compared to Samsung's previous efforts. Also, it just looks nice.

However, we are still talking about a phone camera, as and you can see in our sample photo, it struggles with dynamic range issues. This is true of all smartphone cameras and it is the result of cramming millions of sensors on an area the size of a grain of rice. HDR can help a bit, but phone cameras still have a long way to go.

The 100-percent crop reveals quite a bit of post processing, resulting in soft edges and lack of detail. For all its technical prowess, the S III really does not impress in the camera department. Granted, it is not far behind the One X and it is roughly on par with the LG Optimus 4X, but we just feel Samsung could have and should have done better. The camera is not a major improvement over the S II and it will probably be overshadowed by the new iPhone 5.

Now then, we wanted to see how fast Samsung’s quad-core Exynos really is and how it stacks up against the competition, Qualcomm’s S4 dual-core and Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core.

It turns out that Samsung is faster than any phone in Quadrant, but loses in Antutu quad-core enabled benchmark to both LG Optimus 4X and HTC One X, both Tegra 3 based phones. The phone maxes out Nemamark 1 and scores among the best one and in GL benchmark Egypt and off screen 720 rendering is s clear winner against Tegra 3 or Qualcomm S4. The phone is also the fastest we’ve seen so far in Sunspider and it scores significantly better than any other phone in Browsermark.

Nvidia has a slight advantage with HTC One X in CF benchmark as well as in AndEbenchmark and the two scores in these tests for SIII come from the hot and cold phone. It is clear that performance wise this is the faster phone so far. There is still one thing that we were pointed out by a veteran Samsung Galaxy S II user. There is a delay between pressing the dial key until you get to the dialer and it takes about a second longer than on the S II.

We tried it and saw for ourselves that this was the case, but we are sure that Samsung could fix this if it wants too. Some people might get annoyed that they will be able to get to dialer much faster on their old phone.

Conclusion

Samsung’s Galaxy S III is a worthy successor to the S II. It is an excellent and very fast phone that many will buy, but it’s not perfect. The plastic back cover feels way too cheap for a premium product and fingertip smudges will irk many people. The other issue is the display, and most people who had a chance to see it next to an HTC One X agree that HTC's SLCD is better. The camera also fails to impress, but the competition does not do a much better job, either.

Still, the S III comes with 50GB of Dropbox storage and it also has a microSD slot, replaceable battery, a surprisingly good front facing camera and best-in-class performance. Overall it’s a great phone with a few minor flaws. We just hope that Samsung will listen to reviewers and consumers and improve material quality, as even the Galaxy Nexus feels better than this much more expensive phone. It just doesn't come close to Apple or even HTC in terms of build quality and given the price there is really no justification for cheap plastics.

It’s a great phone and its runner up in the Android world is the HTC One X, if you are into the 4.7-inch or larger screens you won't go wrong with either. However, in the big scheme of things Samsung is going after Apple, not the Android alliance. The S III has what it takes to take on the dated iPhone 4S, but the iPhone 5 is just a few weeks away and the S III won’t have such an easy time competing with Apple’s all-new iPhone.

LG was the first company to introduce a dual-core phone and actually ship it. The company behind the processor was Nvidia and its Tegra 2 chip powered last year’s LG Optimus 2X. LG clearly wanted to continue this collaboration and tapped Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 for its new flagship, the Optimus 4X.

The phone was announced back at the Mobile World Congress 2012 in February and it started shipping in mid to late June, at least in major European markets including Austria and Germany. Other countries should start getting the new Optimus in July.

We managed to get our hands on a white sample, but the phone is also available in black, although we find the white version somewhat more attractive. The MSRP stands at €499, which is pretty much the norm in the Android superphone market. Besides the Tegra 3 SoC clocked at 1.5GHz, the most notable parts of the spec include a very nice 4.7-inch IPS LCD display in 1280x720 resolution, with Corning Gorilla Glass on top. It also comes with an 8-megapixel rear camera, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, 2140 mAh battery and 1GB of RAM.

The test version shipped with 16GB or memory of which some 12 GB are available to the user and it is also worth noting that this phone has a micro SD slot for expansion as well as a user-replacable battery, something that we didn’t get from HTC One X that we reviewed a couple of months back.

The phone weighs 133 grams (4.7 ounces) and measures 132.4 x 68.1 x 8.9 mm. It ships with Android 4.0.3 skinned in Optimus UI 3.0, a trademark of LG phones. US readers will want to know that this is a HSDPA+ capable phone up to 21Mbit per second and it doesn’t support LTE of any kind, but for most other parts of the world this doesn’t make much difference. The phone comes with NFC support as well as Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP and 802.11n capable Wifi.

The rear camera delivers snaps in 3264x2448 pixels, it features autofocus and LED flash and in video mode it supports up to 1080p at 30FPS. The front camera is can take both photos and videos but its purpose is to serve video conferencing needs, so it’s good enough for Hangouts.

First impression

The boxy design is the first thing that caught our eye. The battery cover is a bit curved and gives the illusion of chamfered edges, but still the whole phone looks rather boxy. Still, we are sure that many will like the design. It doesn’t try to imitate other phones on the market and has a unique feel about it, although some people might find it a bit tacky, like LG’s Prada phones.

The back cover is thin and covered in a understated texture which could remind you of faux leather until you touch it. Still, it feels better in the hand than glossy cover used on the Samsung Galaxy III, but again it’s not better than the surface of the HTC One X, which is hardly surprising since HTC does not have a removable battery. The textured plastic cover that makes it quite pleasant in your hand and it leaves a much better impression than the glossy S III. I will go out on a limb here and say that the Optimus beats the S III in terms of build quality, and bear in mind that it is about €100 cheaper than Samsung's new flagship.

The cover also houses the NFC antenna and LG likes to kindly remind consumers not to scratch the back of the battery cover. It is easy to remove the cover and put it back on again and you won’t feel like you are about rip it apart every time you open it, which is not always the case with Galaxy Nexus or Galaxy S III phones.

Staying at the back, the camera is located in the top left corner, with a LED flash next to it and a speaker opening all the way to the bottom. We like the fact that neither the camera, LG logo or speaker are perfectly centered which helps add a bit of personality. It’s a good call given the boxy shape.

The front of the phone is dominated by a 4.7-inch IPS screen, and on top of the screen you can see the speaker, front-facing camera as well as a proximity sensor and obligatory LG logo. The bottom of the front face hides three soft keys: a back key, home and properties key. In terms of display quality, I would rank LG's screen behind the One X and just barely ahead of the S III.

The sides of the phone are wrapped in a two-layer metal frame separated by white plastic and this approach provides the phone with plenty of rigidness and a quality feel.

Apart from this eye pleasing frame the left side hides the volume rocker, while the right side is completely clean.

The top side features a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, nicely molded into the case, and a power/unlock button.

The bottom of the phone hides a micro USB connector.

The battery and the SIM card need to get inserted and you are good to go. We were surprised to see a full-sized SIM card slot, but our micro SIM worked just fine so you will be fine with either.

Of course, a micro SD card is not included in the package, but our test 32GB card worked without any issues. The box contains the battery, a white earbud-style headset as well as black colored power plug and a USB cable. You would want to see a white power plug and USB cable with a completely white phone, but LG thinks differently, pun intended.

The box contains a quick manual as well, with a few basic instructions about the phone. It also ships with two NFC tags allowing you to easily switch phone profiles, for example in car or office mode. It worked just fine for us, but you need to hold the phone’s back to the NFC tag for some two seconds before anything happens. The box itself is rather large and black. It is dominated by the LG logo and 4X HD moniker, but otherwise it’s very eye pleasing.

After the first boot, you need to select a language, provide your Google play account details, as well as potential credit card info in order to purchase apps in the future. Once you went through this process, you are finally good to go. This is a standard procedure for any Android phone, so if you ever had one, you probably already went through this before.

Once we turned the phone on, we checked if there is an update and we were happy to learn that LG had an update from LG P880-V10a to LG P880-V10b-Jun-11-2012. This update probably gets a few bug fixes and it is still based on Android 4.0.3.

User interface, software

We spent a lot of time with the old LG Optimus 2X and were not the biggest fan of its Android 2.2 OS and later 2.3 based Optimus UI 2.0. However, the new UI 3.0 based on Android 4.0 shows a lot more potential. It generally looks better than Optimus UI 2.0 but it still has miles to go. The first thing you notice at the lock screen is that you can unlock to phone menu, messaging, email or camera. This is exactly what most of us need. There will be many that would like to see unlock to Facebook or Twitter, or a customizable shortcut. We were surprised to see that Facebook doesn’t come preinstalled on the phone, but once you install it, you can set to unlock to Facebook, or just about any other application. Good job LG.

Unlock screen unlocks circular showing the home screen behind the lock and more you drag your finger, the more screen you see. It looks nice and a bit different from the ones we’ve seen so far. Face unlock as well as pattern are also available, no surprise there. The quick settings are customizable and you can access many of the settings just by swiping your finger top to down. There is a quick note application on top of that list that lets you make some notes, which we find very useful but at the same time, you cannot use the keyboard to type in, just write with a finger in a stylus mode which is rather limited.

Many phones nowadays have some special motion features and the Optimus 4X is no exception. If you flip it when someone calls you, it will mute the phone. Flipping the phone when your alarm tries to wake you up will snooze it and flip during video will pause it. Still this is rather limited compared to HTC One x or Samsung Galaxy III that went much further with the clever use of sensors for basic commands. If you tilt the device in home screen, you will be able to rearrange the icons between screens.

The home screen has lost the 3D weather icon that we all knew from LG interface 2.0 under Android 2.3 and Optimus 2X and it now comes with Yahoo powered weather and clock application. The home screen taskbar also contains phone, contacts, messaging and apps on the bottom of it, and by default you get up to seven screens.

The first thing that we found very irritating was the fact that applications cannot be reached all that easily, as the search function does not seem to work. If you are an app addict and happen to have a hundred applications, you will have to go through all of them to find the one that you need. This is really boring and slow. Someone did mention that all this has to do with Google’s legal spat with Apple, but not all Android phones miss this feature. We can confirm that HTC One X has a very capable search that gets you quickly to the desired application.

The phone itself and the dialer are very responsive and do what they are supposed to do. As is the case with any new phone the keyboard will take some getting used to. It’s nothing spectacular but we like the fact that you can swap the language fast via dedicated key, which helps people who use more than one language on a daily basis.

Email and SMS application do what they are supposed to, as well as the rather fast default browser. Naturally Chrome can be installed too and it also works great, minus support for Flash in case you care about that.

The phone comes preinstalled with some of applications including Android live wallpapers, bubbles screensaver, Polaris office, power control widget, LG smart world, today+ widget and world clock. Many will be happy to hear that you can uninstall them via the application manager, so LG scores well in the bloatware department. LG also ships its own backup application as well as LG Tag+, an app that will help you make the most of the bundled NFC tags. The phone also comes with Media Home, an application that keeps your videos, pictures and music at one place, it comes with Smart share a DLNA application that will let you share your content with other DLNA devices and LG ships its LG Smart World application store.

We liked the fact that software update shortcut is a part of application and it will make checking for an update much easier and faster. There is a task manager that does what you expect it to do and long pressing home key will get the Ice Cream Sandwich task manager and show you the applications running, that you can just swipe to kill. The music player is terrible and you will definitely want to swap it with a third party app, pretty much any half-decent app will be better than stock one.

Naturally widgets are present and they work just as well as on any Android 4.0 phone and voice search and typing work well too.

Performance, Camera

Since this is a Tegra 3 based phone Shadowgun, Zen Pinball, Max Payne and any other THD game will run great. As was the case with HTC One X the phone can get very hot despite being thicker than One X. Gaming tends to get it go 40 Celsius or 104 Fahrenheit but this was also the case with Galaxy III or HTC One X.

The most demanding games will get your quad-core hot, no question about that. However, this applies to all high-end phones, even HTC’s One S with dual-core Snapdragon S4 28nm CPU. Tegra 3 works at its standard 1.5GHz but in idle the phone works at really low 500MHz on the companion core, and still wakes up really quickly.

Everyday tasks like simply swiping screens, playing games, browsing, enjoying music will all work fast. The speaker is relatively loud and it will come in handy while watching videos sans headphones.

In terms of performance we were surprised to learn that LG Optimus 4X was slightly faster than One X in Quadrant, Antutu, Nenamark but at the same time it lost by a wide margin in CF bench v1.1 and failed to keep up with the One X in AndEBench and GLBenchmark.

The real surprise is that LG Optimus 4X ends up almost 20 percent faster than One X in Browsermark and that it runs Sun Spider 0.9.1 much faster than the One X, making it the fastest phone for browsing based on Tegra 3 so far. Samsung’s Galaxy III will give the Optimus a run for its money, but this is another story altogether.

Overall the Optimus 4X was quite fast phone with a few surprisingly low scores. Battery life is slightly better than HTC One X that we tested here and it will get you close to two whole days, or 48 hours of modest use and with Facebook, Twitter, emails and browsing. We are sure that the phone will get most consumers through the day without crying out for a socket.

This gets us to the camera, an 8-megapixel affair with a maximum resolution of 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus and LED flash. The camera takes some 1 to 2 seconds to launch and it can take rather good pictures even in relatively low light, i.e. indoors. The UI is decent, no complaints here.

It cannot take photos quite as quickly as the One X but it can shoot multiple photos at about 1 photo per second. The front camera is decent at it will be good for chat and picture if it’s absolutely necessary.

The video feature is nice and works at 1080p 30FPS. You can take photos during the video which is nice. In our short video test, autofocus feature worked quite nicely but it was a bright day outside. Overall the camera and video recorder will help you record some memorable moments and many vacation / Facebook photos. It is one of the better cameras we’ve seen on a phone so far, but it is still not quite as good as the one used in the HTC One X.

Here's a sample photo and a 100% crop.

Admittedly not the best view of the Danube, but we really weren’t going for artistic value. As you can see the camera does a good job in daylight, although the noise reduction algorithm does seem a bit too aggressive on the 100 percent crop, but this is true of practically all phone cameras.

Conclusion

LG’s Optimus 4X is definitely a huge improvement over the Optimus 2X. Battery life is significantly better, the 1280x720 4.7-inch screen is a vast improvement over the predecessor and it features a nice camera.

However, the boxy design won’t be something that everyone will enjoy, as well as the Optimus 3.0 interface and preinstalled applications. We believe vanilla Android 4.0, HTC Sense 4.0 and TouchWiz look much better which is definitely something that might be a turn off for many.

The good thing for LG is that its main competitor lacks a replaceable battery and micro SD card slot. If you can’t live without these features, the Optimus might be the phone for you. We just hope that this phone gets Jelly Bean Android 4.1 but LG doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to timely Android rollouts.

LG also priced this phone at €499, while the One X with 32GB sells for €529 and the lack of some free cloud storage like Dropbox might also be an issue for many. If you shop around, you can pick either up for about €480 in retail. Samsung’s S III also comes out on top, thanks to its speedy Exynos processor and great battery life, but it is also a bit expensive.

If you like LG this might be the phone for you, but our feeling is that it should end up with a somewhat better deal if you go for its main competitor, the HTC One X. The Optimus is not a bad choice, but it leaves us with some mixed feelings, particularly in the UI department.